Madam Speaker, just as I was saying the Liberal Party had received these illegal donations from SNC-Lavalin, all of these members came scurrying in. They heard the word “donation” and, all of a sudden, they were very excited and the House went from completely empty to chock full. I am sorry to dangle that carrot in front of my Liberal friends. They can resist everything except temptation.
Just last week, the Prime Minister was at a glitzy Liberal fundraiser where some first nations protesters rose to raise the concern of mercury poisoning. He chuckled at their plight and had them thrown out aggressively by security. However, he was kind enough to thank them for their donation as they went out the door to the great roars of laughter from the $1,500 Liberal donors and glitterati who looked on in the audience.
However, I have digressed and go back to the subject at hand. Was SNC's alleged fraud in Libya an isolated incident? No, it was not. It was part of a long-standing pattern of proven corruption that has been upheld by judges and has resulted in convictions going back 20 years to the present, with convictions being issued as recently as one and a half years ago.
This is a company that had actually developed a coding system to account for bribery within it. It created its own accounting code so that it could go on bribing officials and account for it in a way that neither the tax authorities or anyone else would know what was going on. To do that, to have a special coding system, one has to be systematically focused on the objective of bribing and defrauding other people. In other words, this was not just a few bad apples that went off to Libya, did some inappropriate things and we ought to just let them take the fall and the company move on. This is systematic, rotten corruption that goes to the core of the company and has been prevalent in the heart of that enterprise for many years. In other words, the company does not qualify for a deferred prosecution agreement on the grounds that it was an isolated incident, far from it. It seems to be its modus operandi.
The director of public prosecutions carefully analyzed the facts the company put forward and determined through those facts that the deferred prosecution agreement provided for in law was not appropriate in this case. That is the end of the story, right?
Wrong. It is not end of the story. For the Prime Minister, it was the beginning of the story. The story is a very ugly and sordid tale, but one we have started to hear over the last two months. At that point in time, September 4, 2018, the director of public prosecutions accurately and properly concludes that SNC-Lavalin should go to trial and face the music for its alleged $130 million of bribery and corruption and says so in a letter to the executives, a letter that the company will not go on to reveal for more than a month, during which time its shareholders were kept in the dark. It sounds like a lot has changed over there.
However, the company did not take no for an answer. Lobbyists swarmed to Parliament Hill. The lobbyist registry shows meetings between SNC officials and top-level personnel in the Prime Minister's Office and in the finance minister's office. In fact, the finance minister himself met with the company approximately 10 days after the director of public prosecutions rendered her decision to ensure the trial would go ahead.
After that extraordinary act of lobbying and those 10 days that followed the prosecutor's decision, the political heat started to rise. The former attorney general started to face veiled threats, hounding, pressure and interference. By the way, all of those words I just used were quoted from her mouth. She experienced a September 18 meeting with the Prime Minister where he attempted to strong-arm her into granting a deferred prosecution agreement and shelving the charges. She said she looked him in the eye and asked if he was interfering with her job as the Attorney General, because she would “strongly advise against it.”
So much for his subsequent claim that she never once raised a concern about his personal political interference, but that meeting would only be the beginning. A cavalcade of pressure would come marching through her office again and again.
The chief of staff to the finance minister would reach out in emails and text messages. Other senior staff in the Prime Minister's Office, including the senior adviser, the principal secretary and the chief of staff would all go and meet personally with top-level staff members of the former attorney general, constantly twisting their arms. They said things such as “we don't want to debate legalities anymore” and “there is no solution here that does not involve some interference.” I am not paraphrasing. This is what they said. It is in the notes. Those notes were transmitted by text message to the former attorney general and have since been tabled with the justice committee and made available for all eyes to see.
Then we had that incredible meeting by phone between the former attorney general and the Clerk of the Privy Council in which the clerk said he wanted to talk to her about the SNC-Lavalin issue. That conversation went on for 17 minutes, during which, more than a dozen times, the Clerk of the Privy Council attempted to change the former attorney general's mind. He used terms like the Prime Minister is very “firm”. He used the word “firm” four times. The Clerk of the Privy Council indicated that the Prime Minister was in one of those moods. He said that the Prime Minister would “find a way to get it done, one way or another”.
The only way he could get it done, the only way he could get such an agreement imposed on the prosecutor, was if he removed his Attorney General. More ominously, the clerk said he was worried. “Worried about what?” asked the former attorney general. He replied he was worried because it is never good for the Attorney General and the Prime Minister to be at loggerheads. He warned of a “collision” between the Attorney General and her boss, the Prime Minister.
If someone warns us that we are about to have a collision with our boss if we do not do what we are told, what does that mean? What would we later interpret it to mean if that same boss moved us out of our job only weeks later? Would we think that collision and that removal from the job were two totally unrelated events? Or would we conclude, as the former attorney general did, and most of the rest of the country has, that the Prime Minister removed her because she refused to do his bidding and stop the trial for SNC-Lavalin.
What is interesting about the former attorney general's account is that it has never changed. She came before a committee and testified at great length. She faced aggressive questioning from Liberal members on the committee. An aggressive group of the Prime Minister's supporters in the press have attempted to discredit her. They have tried to poke holes in everything she said, but they cannot find anything.
She did an unprecedented thing on Friday. She handed over 40 pages of text messages, personal notes and diary entries, and of course audio recordings. What did the Liberals say in response? They said there was nothing new there and they are right. There was nothing there. Why? It is because her story had not changed. It upheld every claim she had made. There was not a single solitary contradiction the Liberals could find.
For judges in courtrooms and police officers conducting investigations, when they have to choose between the credibility of two competing individuals, they always gravitate toward the person whose story does not change. In this case, that person is the former attorney general. By contrast, the Prime Minister's story changes faster than his colourful socks. He always has a new story.
Let me note one twist and turn in this drama. The Prime Minister said that if anyone, including the former attorney general, had issues with anything they might have experienced in the government or didn't feel that they were living up to the high standards the government set for itself, it was their responsibility to come forward, and no one did.
However, we have that incredible recording, which was made two months before the Prime Minister made the statement that no one came forward. In it, the former attorney general says to the Prime Minister's clerk:
So we are treading on dangerous ground here—and I am going to issue my stern warning—um—because I cannot act in a manner and the prosecution cannot act in a manner that is not objective, that isn’t independent. I cannot act in a partisan way and I cannot be politically motivated. All of this screams of that.
So much for the notion that no one came forward.
That was one of seven times in that 17-minute conversation that she made similar comments. She said that it was “inappropriate”, that she felt “uncomfortable”, that she was waiting for “the other shoe to drop”, and that it reminded her of the “Saturday night massacre”, a reference to Richard Nixon's firing of justice department officials to cover up Watergate. Nevertheless, we are to believe that no one raised any concerns.
Since then, the Prime Minister's story has been that the conversation did happen but no one told him about it. He said he left on vacation right after the call was made, so no one had a chance to tell him as he was gone. The only problem with that story is that he did not leave on vacation right after the call was made. After that story came out, a few intrepid journalists looked at the publicly available schedule of the Prime Minister and found that he did not leave on vacation for another two days. Two days is a heck of a long time, and it is very easy to brief someone on a 17-minute conversation in a two-hour period.
However, the Prime Minister would have us believe that he could not be briefed because he was busy packing for his vacation. He had to pack lots of socks in order to prepare for that vacation. For two days, he was hunkered down in his closet at home, in his government-owned mansion, preparing for that exhausting vacation ahead. He was packing his bags so that he could go off and surf in Tofino, never to be distracted by a pesky phone call from his top public servant about an issue that the Prime Minister had considered of intense importance only hours before the call happened.
Furthermore, we have the testimony from the clerk, who said, when he was admonishing the former attorney general for not reaching out to the Prime Minister personally, that he was available 24-7. If he was available 24-7, how is it possible that the Clerk of the Privy Council would have no opportunity between December 19 and February 15, a two-month period, to tell the Prime Minister about this exceptional and explosive phone call he had with the former attorney general on this issue of dramatic importance?
That is just one contradiction of that particular claim. The other, of course, is that the former attorney general met with the Prime Minister on September 18 and told him of her concerns. She looked him in the eye at that time. Now we have one documented example of her raising her concerns with him personally. We have the second tape-recorded example of her raising her concerns with the Clerk of the Privy Council. Then we have a dramatic meeting between the former attorney general and the principal secretary to the Prime Minister, Gerald Butts, the puppet master of the PMO, in which she raised concerns about the inappropriate interference of the Prime Minister's Office in the case. Still, somehow the Prime Minister expects us to believe that he knew absolutely nothing about her concerns or about her decision not to grant a special deal to this company.
That is simply not believable, but if it is truly the Prime Minister's position and he really believes he can defend it, then he can agree with our singular demand today, which is to reopen the justice committee investigation and invite roughly a dozen witnesses, including those accused of interfering with the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. If they have nothing to hide, if he has nothing to hide, he will let them all appear under oath, without restriction, to answer questions. If he walks into this place and offers to do that, I will end my speech now.
In all seriousness, if the Prime Minister were to stand in his place and make the commitment that the justice committee investigation will reopen, then he has my commitment to return to my chair and allow the debate to continue with other speakers so that Canadians can get to the truth. If he has nothing to hide, why would he not do it? What could be the harm in having questions?
He says that there is nothing to learn and that we have already learned everything there is to learn. Okay, then it will just be a redundant exercise. I suppose that would be the first time in the history of Parliament that anything redundant happened or that anyone repeated themselves. I think I have done it a few times in my speech, but no one noticed.
Really, if the Prime Minister has nothing to hide, what harm would it do to bring people before the committee, ask them questions about their role in the scandal and get the answers in a report from the committee before the election? If the Prime Minister truly has nothing to hide, then that is exactly what he will do.
It has been brought to my attention that the Prime Minister is not only going to shut down the justice committee and ethics committee investigations into this scandal but that he has now bailed on question period for today. I have not been able to independently confirm it, but I am understanding from a note just passed to me that the Prime Minister's newly released itinerary shows that he will not be present for a second time in a row.
Of course, Parliament was out last week, so he dodged question period during that time. Yesterday he was missing in action, and today we are told that at two o'clock, when the government stands to answer for its conduct in this scandal, he will once again hide behind other ministers and refuse to appear and defend himself. That tells an awful lot about his guilty state of mind. He knows that his story has been riddled with contradictions. He does not want those contradictions queried before Canada's House of Commons.
Let us move on to the next part of the Prime Minister's story.
He claimed that the reason he was so anxious to interfere in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin is that if he did not, 9,000 jobs would vanish. It was an odd claim, and one I found suspect from the very beginning. I have to say that everything we have learned since then proves it was false.
When Gerry Butts came to the committee and was asked what evidence he had that 9,000 jobs would vanish, he said he had nothing specific. When Michael Wernick was asked if he had any documents or briefing notes he could share with the committee to show that these 9,000 jobs he kept talking about would be gone if the prosecution proceeded, he said no. The Prime Minister was then asked at a press conference if he had any evidence he could produce to show that 9,000 jobs would vanish. Again, he failed to be forthcoming with it.
Why would they have no such evidence? It is because the claim is false.
Let me walk through it piece by piece.
First of all, the Prime Minister's claim that the headquarters of the company would leave in the fall of 2018 if the attorney general did not immediately intervene to give the company a deferred prosecution agreement is easily disprovable by publicly available facts. We know the company signed a $1.5-billion loan agreement with the Quebec pension plan that required the company's headquarters to remain in Montreal at least until the year 2024. We also know the company just signed a 20-year lease on its headquarters there and announced a multi-million-dollar renovation of that headquarters to accommodate its thousands of Montreal-area employees. Typically, companies that are renovating to accommodate their existing workforce do not get up and leave. It is kind of a waste of money. They do not sign 20-year leases and they do not sign $1.5-billion loan deals that oblige them to stay put for six or seven years. Therefore, the claim the Prime Minister made on September 18 when he met with the former attorney general—the claim that she had mere days to signal negotiations for a special deal for SNC-Lavalin or the company would leave the country altogether—was completely, utterly and demonstrably false.
His broader claim about 9,000 jobs is equally false. The company has $52 billion worth of construction projects located in Canada. It runs the five biggest construction projects in our country right now, and here is the thing about construction: Companies have to do a construction project where the project is located. It is a simple complication. They cannot build a road in Canada from far away in Beijing or in London, England. As an example, Ottawa just hired SNC for a transit project that will go from, roughly, downtown to the south end. The company cannot build 14 kilometres of rail transit in a foreign country and drop it out of the sky from a helicopter onto the nation's capital. The project is here. Therefore, the jobs are here and the jobs are not going anywhere.
The jobs that SNC has moved were moved before the company found out that it would necessarily face trial. In fact, four-fifths of the company's workforce is already outside of Canada, and that was long before the government ever signalled that the company would be required to go to trial. In other words, the movement of SNC-Lavalin jobs out of Canada has nothing to do with the prosecution, and therefore that justification itself is flawed.
Finally, the government has been telling us that if the company is forced to face trial and is ultimately convicted, the consequence would be that it would lose the ability to bid on Canadian contracts.
I am going to read directly from a report on exactly that question that the Deputy Minister of Justice Canada, Nathalie Drouin, wrote to the Clerk of the Privy Council in the matter of SNC-Lavalin. It refers to the Canadian integrity regime. This is the regime that bans corrupt businesses from doing business with the Government of Canada. It says this:
The ability of a company/supplier to contract with the federal government is affected by the Ineligibility and Suspension Policy (Policy). The Policy ensures the government does business only with ethical companies/suppliers in Canada and abroad. Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) administers the Policy on behalf of the government.
The Policy sets out when and how a company or supplier may be declared ineligible or suspended from doing business with the government. It provides that a company/supplier is suspended when charged with, or admits guilt to one of a number of listed offences, such as fraud and bribery of foreign public officials. The suspension from being able to contract with the federal government is for a duration of 18 months. This suspension is subject to extension pending the final disposition of the charges.
The report goes on to discuss administrative agreements. It says:
The company/supplier can enter into an Administrative Agreement with the government to stay the suspension. An Administrative Agreement is an arrangement between the company/supplier and the government where the former must adopt certain compliance measures. It is used to mitigate the risk of contracting with a particular company/supplier. For example, the government and a company/supplier may wish to enter in Administrative—